HTML5 - Web SQL Database

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The Web SQL Database API isn't actually part of the HTML5 specification but it is a separate specification which introduces a set of APIs to manipulate client-side databases using SQL.

I'm assuming you are a great web developer and if that is the case then no doubt, you would be well aware of SQL and RDBMS concepts. If you still want to have a session with SQL then, you can go through our SQL Tutorial.

Web SQL Database will work in latest version of Safari, Chrome and Opera.

The Core Methods:

There are following three core methods defined in the spec that I.m going to cover in this tutorial:

openDatabase: This method creates the database object either using existing database or creating new one.

transaction: This method give us the ability to control a transaction and performing either commit or rollback based on the situation.

executeSql: This method is used to execute actual SQL query.

Opening Database:

The openDatabase method takes care of opening a database if it already exists, this method will create it if it already does not exist.

To create and open a database, use the following code:

var db = openDatabase('mydb', '1.0', 'Test DB', 2 * 1024 * 1024);

Above method took following five paramters:

Database name

Version number

Text description

Size of database

Creation callback

The last and 5th argument, creation callback will be called if the database is being created. Without this feature, however, the databases are still being created on the fly and correctly versioned.

Executing queries:

To execute a query you use the database.transaction() function. This function needs a single argument, which is a function that takes care of actually executing the query as follows: